I try to tell everyone to think, beyond that...what can be done?
I believe in freedom of religion and freedom for people to think what people want.
Actions can be punishable, but thinking or believing???...especially in private and alone?
I don't think you will actually get too far suggesting to any religious person that the scriptures they are reading are contradictory, etc.
People have to on their own resolve these issues. The Sufi faith, which is under of the umbrella of Islam is quite peaceful.
Are they practicing their spin on Islam correctly or not?
Who can say, but I can look to their actions and say they are peaceful. My own opinion is Sufism focuses on the spiritual aspect of Islam which is why they are peaceful, and the fundamentalist Muslims focus on non spiritual aspects of Islam which is why they are aggressive and fundamentalist in their actions. Same true for Christianity, where we have seen peaceful and spiritual Christians, and warlike fundamentalist crusaders in Christianity.
I can look to the history of both Islam and Christianity, and see crusades and bloody converting people to their own respective belief system.
Convert or die, confess or die, etc.
Is that what God wants?
I'm in no position to say what God wants...but I do find almost universally that killers don't want to be killed, thieves don't want to be robbed, liars don't like being lied to...so I do think there is a universal human concept of what is actually goodly, if not Godly.
I believe in freedom of religion and freedom for people to think what people want.
Actions can be punishable, but thinking or believing???...especially in private and alone?
I don't think you will actually get too far suggesting to any religious person that the scriptures they are reading are contradictory, etc.
People have to on their own resolve these issues. The Sufi faith, which is under of the umbrella of Islam is quite peaceful.
Are they practicing their spin on Islam correctly or not?
Who can say, but I can look to their actions and say they are peaceful. My own opinion is Sufism focuses on the spiritual aspect of Islam which is why they are peaceful, and the fundamentalist Muslims focus on non spiritual aspects of Islam which is why they are aggressive and fundamentalist in their actions. Same true for Christianity, where we have seen peaceful and spiritual Christians, and warlike fundamentalist crusaders in Christianity.
I can look to the history of both Islam and Christianity, and see crusades and bloody converting people to their own respective belief system.
Convert or die, confess or die, etc.
Is that what God wants?
I'm in no position to say what God wants...but I do find almost universally that killers don't want to be killed, thieves don't want to be robbed, liars don't like being lied to...so I do think there is a universal human concept of what is actually goodly, if not Godly.
Quote from Gubinec:
It's not my translation, as in "I DID NOT TRANSLATE THAT FROM ARABIC TO ENGLISH MYSELF".
Please do tell Muslims that what they are reading is probably not really what it was originally. See what I'm getting at? Quran is the unchanged word of God, is one of the core beliefs of Islam.
It is widely accepted within Islam that there were multiple version of the Quran, until the third Caliph Uthman decided to burn all other versions and leave only one (the "ancestor" of modern copies of Quran).
You're missing the point of this thread, My point is not to investigate what the original Quran said, how it said it, what might have changed, what didn't, blah blah blah blah...[you can make up a 100 reasons here].
My point was to take the currently accepted translations of the Quran, widely read by most Muslims (at least English-speaking), and show them a contradiction between what they believe and what their holy book says.
There is no reason to believe that the Arabic version doesn't say the same thing, unless you're to believe that there was a conspiracy between all three translators (Picktal, Yusuf-ali, and Shakir) to give false meaning to the original Arabic verses.
If you're looking for the most original copy of Quran, if you could somehow get access to the Samarkand copy of the Quran, that would be the oldest preserved copy.
